jethro has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Esteemed Monks,

In the next few days I have to put up a forum software on my web server to serve as a discussion board for students enrollened for a specific lecture. I'm naturally looking for something perl based, but my three most important requirements are security, fast install and security. With fast install I mean that I don't need a full fledged CMS, and that there is already some standard (css) skin included and I don't need to invest time into web page design to get it up and running.

In a similar question in 2002 perlmonks were suggesting IkonBoard http://www.ikonboard.com as a good forum software but in the same year the original creators left the project to create a new forum software in php. ikonboard still exists, with new maintainers, but is it still good?

Another alternative seems to be Parley, based on Catalyst, but is it ready for deployment, and is it written with security in mind ?

And there is the Everything engine, for which I have confidence securitywise but it seems to be more a complete CMS and not a simple forum software

Others out there, like E-Blah http://www.eblah.com/, mwForum http://www.mwforum.org/, ikonForums http://www.ikonforums.com might also be worth a look, has anyone information on them? Is there anything else I didn't find? YaBB is out of the question, past experiences of perlmonks disqualify it.

Any suggestions?

UPDATE: I finally used mwForum. The code looks clean, well structured and easy to read, the maintainer is helpful and answers fast. On the other hand it doesn't use taint-mode, uses no CGI or template module and I found a very minor non-critical bug (testing for empty string with "if ($string)") almost immediately when I wanted to change some code.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Forum/Bulletin Board software
by tinita (Parson) on Oct 16, 2008 at 18:20 UTC
    I'm developing a portal software which also has a forum. (careful, it uses bbcode =)

    you can see a little demo on http://battie.perlpunks.de/demo.

    at the moment i'm making some changes to the board structure in the database so I'm not working on anything else until that is finished. so it's definitely not ready in the next few days (at the moment I wouldn't install it because the changes I make to the board table are not easy to automize).

    so this post is more like a "I'm working on it, and I'd be happy for beta testers" (I have one tester already who helped me to get it working on postgres). /msg me for getting the svn url.

      I'm developing a portal software which also has a forum. (careful, it uses bbcode =)
      As a side note, BBCode was first invented for a Perl-based forum software, UBB, which is then adopted by other forums, including YaBB (also Perl-based) and PHPBB (PHP-based).
Re: Forum/Bulletin Board software
by perrin (Chancellor) on Oct 16, 2008 at 18:44 UTC
      Yes, they seem a bit big for the task. The install document in slashcode.com's FAQ also has the information (probably from 2006) that slash only works on Apache 1.x and they don't plan to support 2.x. Either the website is not up to date or the slashcode ;-)
        Many of the biggest sites on the net run on Apache 1.x. There's really nothing wrong with it, although for a new project I'd probably start with Apache 2.
Re: Forum/Bulletin Board software
by jdrago_999 (Hermit) on Oct 16, 2008 at 20:26 UTC
    Just do what everyone else does: Write A New One.
Re: Forum/Bulletin Board software
by Anonymous Monk on Oct 19, 2008 at 21:49 UTC
    I like mwForum, but that's speaking from a user's perspective -- I've never tried to administer it.